The URL can be one, but when you scrape, you extract the data not necessarily for the URL but for other data fields that are displayed on the website which can be - depends on the business use case - product name or product price, or some text or other information from any type of website. So with web crawling the output is a lot more simple because it's just a list of URLs - I mean you can have other fields as well but the main elements are the URLs.Īnd with web scraping, you usually have a lot more fields 5-10-20 or more data fields. Or maybe the URL needs to contain some kind of word for example and you collect all those URLs - and then you create a scraper that extracts predefined data fields from those pages. So first you create a crawler that will output all the page URLs that you care about - it can be pages in a specific category on the site or in specific parts of the website. For example, search engines crawl the web so they can index pages and display them in the search results.īut another data crawling example would be when you have one website that you want to extract data from - in this case you know the domain - but you don't have the page URLs of that specific website.
So that you can do something with them later. And this is the reason you crawl: you want to find the URLs. With crawling, you probably don't know the specific URLs and you probably don't know the domains either. And it's a big difference because with scraping you usually know the target websites, you may not know the specific page URLs, but you know the domains at least. The data fields you want to extract from specific websites. In web scraping, it's all about the data. Going deeper, there's a big difference in the purpose of these two things and how they work. This means you extract data and do something with it, like storing it in a database or further processing it.
#WEBCRAWLER VS WEBSCRAPER DOWNLOAD#
So you first crawl - or discover - the URLs, download the HTML files, and then scrape the data from those files.
Usually, in web data extraction projects, you need to combine crawling and scraping. While crawling is about finding or discovering URLs or links on the web. The short answer is that web scraping is about extracting the data from one or more websites.
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